Then he would clamber over her, like a squirrel going up a tree-trunk, until she tumbled into some big chair and rated him for being so boisterous, and drew him close to her so that he revelled in her love for him as in long meadow-grass.  Even as she imagined that night before Peacey came, he did not struggle in her arms but gave her kiss for kiss.  They would be sphered in joy, until they heard a sniff and saw the other child standing at the open door, resting its flabby cheek on the handle, surveying them with wild eyes.  There would be a moment of dislocation.  Then she would cry, “Come along, Roger!” and Richard would slip from her knee and the other child would come and very gratefully put its arms round her neck and kiss her.  It would go on kissing and kissing her, as if it needed reassurance.

But she had always done her duty by Roger.  That had not been so very difficult a matter at first, for Grandmother had made a great fuss of him and taken him off her hands for most of the day.  Marion had never felt quite at ease about this, for she knew that he was receiving nothing, since the old woman was only affecting to find him lovable in order that it might seem that something good had come of the marriage which she had engineered.  But the problem was settled when he was eighteen months old, for then Grandmother died.  Marion did not feel either glad or sorry.  God had dreamed her and her grandmother in different dreams.  It was well that they should separate.  But it had the immediate disadvantage of throwing her into perpetual contact with the other child.  She looked after it assiduously, but she always felt when she had been with it for an hour or two that she wanted to go a great distance and breathe air that it had not breathed.  Perpetually she marvelled at its contentedness and gentleness and unexigent hunger for love, and planted seeds of affection for it in her heart, but they would never mature.

The relationship became still more galling to her after yet another eighteen months, when Harry came back to live with his family at Torque Hall, who had returned there the year before.  No communication passed between them, but sometimes by chance he met her in the lanes when she was out with the children.  The first time he tried to speak to her, but she turned away, and Richard said, “Look here, you don’t know us,” so after that they only looked at one another.  They would walk slowly past each other with their heads bent, and as they drew near she would lift her eyes and see him, beautiful and golden as a corn of wheat, and she would know from his eyes that, dark for his fair, she was as beautiful, and they would both look at Richard, who ran at her right side and was as beautiful as the essence of both their beauties.  It seemed as if a band of light joined the bodies of these three, as if it were contracting and pulling them together, as if in a moment they would be pressed together and would dissolve in loving cries upon each other’s breasts.